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Era of Stagnation
|} The Era of Stagnation (Russian: Эпоха застоя), also known by GETchanners as the Special Period (Russian: Особый период), was a period marked by the decline of traffic on various communist chans. It began in 2014 and ended in 2019, lasting about 5 years. History Not much is known about the causes behind the Era of Stagnation, though it is documented to have begun with Oniichan in April of 2014. From there, it continued with 7clams in May, reached Lunachan in July, spread to /ref/ in September, and finally arrived at GETchan in October. Attempts to curtail the stagnation began in late 2014, with 7clams recommending its users to post each time they visited the site. GETchan and /ref/ went on to form a union with /leftypol/ called the USSC in January 2015 in an attempt to encourage crossboard posting. GETchan absorbed the remnants of Oniichan not long after. The USSC project proved to be a failure as GETchan remained the only site that fully merged into the new USSC. As a result, the loose union collapsed and GETchan went down for two weeks. With the restoration of GETchan and stagnation still rampant on all the involved chans, /ref/ and Lunachan merged into GETchan as the new /ref/ and /luna/ boards on the chan in October and November, respectively. This was still not enough to boost posting, however, and /luna/ was voluntarily shut down by the Lunachan staff in June of 2018. With two of the chans originally affected by the stagnation gone and another two having merged into one with no end in sight, a further merger with Bunkerchan (the official bunker for /leftypol/ in case 8chan was ever taken down) was agreed on. GETchan (at this point the boards of /GET/ and /ref/), became an autonomous section of Bunkerchan in November of 2018. Despite this, the stagnation would continue for another 10 months. End On 5 August, 2019, 8chan (the chan hosting /leftypol/) was taken down and the /leftypol/etarians swiftly moved to their bunker. After some negotiation between the staffs of GETchan, /leftypol/, and Bunkerchan, an agreement was reached to axe unnecessary boards that could potentially interfere with the traffic of /GET/ and /ref/ (namely /dprk/ and /int/, respectively) as well as to move content from /leftypol/ to the appropriate GETchan boards. The most significant move of these was the move of /leftytrash/, a general from /leftypol/ with the original intention of being the board's random thread. With /GET/ taking its place as the sole random board on Bunkerchan, /leftytrash/ was given the option to move to /GET/ or stay in /leftypol/. With no objections to the /GET/ move, the move was announced on 14 August and was scheduled to take place 3 days from then. On 17 August, the thread was moved and the remaining residents of /GET/ quickly bonded with the new /leftytrash/ users. The move quickly spurred new discussion and an influx of users, reaching heights of around 60 posters. Following the move, a vote was held for /leftytrash/ users to select a volunteer to represent their thread in the staff of GETchan. A /ref/ user was also selected and added to the staff, resulting in what has been described as the "three main communities of GETchan", pre-move /GET/, pre-merger /ref/, and /leftytrash/. The /leftytrash/ move is seen as the end of the Era of Stagnation, though the future of 7clams still remains in question.